From LQWiki

SuSE is one of the oldest and most well known Linux distributions. It is RPM-based, and it is well known for its stability and for the quality of its configuration toolkit, YAST. There are SuSE Linux flavours tailored for desktop, laptop, office and server needs.

SuSE is seen as a good distro for beginners (along with Mandriva or Fedora) and enterprises (along with Red Hat) as it provides a user friendly environment, with GUI's for configuring hardware in the excellent Yast. KDE has been integrated into SuSE (Gnome and other window managers are included) providing seamless configuration.

History

Originally a German organisation, SuSE was acquired in 2003 by the US networking giant, Novell, but will retain their SuSE brand name and independent operations. This move is intended to give SuSE a better foothold in the US, and Novell a significant share in the Linux business.

SuSE was sometimes debated in the free software community because it heavily relied on the YAST configuration toolkit, that was released under a non-open source license. The YAST2 license for current versions of SuSE is the GPL, too.

Suse support forums

Novell has a set of support forums for its products, including Suse. These can be found on your web browser, starting at Novell support forums. For those wanting to use an NNTP news reader, e.g., Pan, you can use Tools/News Servers to add Novell's news server, support-forums.novell.com, to the list of servers accessed.

A very convenient way for beginners to get support is the Freenode irc channel #suse.

Links

• Officially recognized LQ Suse forum
• The openSUSE project (www.opensuse.org)
• SUSE Installation Walkthrough with Screenshots (www.debianadmin.com)
• Suse 9.3 license (br-linux.org)
• yast2 license - GPL (www.novell.com)
• SuSE website (www.suse.com)
• SuSE 9.1 Personal Edition review (www.thejemreport.com)
• SuSE 9.2 Personal Edition review by LinuxDig (www.linuxdig.com)
• 9.2 evaluation CD (www.suse.com)
• www.susewiki.org (www.susewiki.org)